All the way to Tonga
UN chief calls rising seas a ‘worldwide catastrophe’
Highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in the far more vulnerable Pacific island nations, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres issued yet another climate SOS to the world. This time he said those initials stand for “save our seas.”
The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization Monday issued reports on worsening sea level rise, turbocharged by a warming Earth and melting ice sheets and glaciers. They highlight how the Southwestern Pacific is not only hurt by the rising oceans, but by other climate change effects of ocean acidification and marine heat waves.
Guterres toured Samoa and Tonga and made his climate plea from Tonga’s capital on Tuesday at a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, whose member countries are among those most imperiled by climate change. Next month the United Nations General Assembly holds a special session to discuss rising seas.
“This is a crazy situation,” Guterres said. “Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making. A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”
“A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril,” he said. “The ocean is overflowing.”
Tonga and Samoa are 468 miles apart, which means Guterres would have to take a fossil fueled flight between them. For Somoa, the tide gauge was actually moving up slowly, less than would be expected for a Holocene warm period, until the 2009 earthquake, which has caused the rise to accelerate. Tonga’s gauge only goes back to 2000, so, there is no actual long term trend. It really is all doom and gloom with these climahypocrites, and little science.
